Lingua fracas

How fluency or lack of fluency in a language can alter our perceptions of people: the powerful can seem like underdogs, good guys may appear ridiculous, and bad guys almost admirable

One of the best feel-good films of last year was Gauri Shinde's English Vinglish, with Sridevi as a diffident, middle-aged woman visiting America and barely knowing how to get by, given her very limited knowledge of English. On arriving in New York, she is assailed by words spoken in incomprehensible accents, as well as threatening street signs. At one point the film's music track expresses her disoriented state of mind through a cacophony of sounds coming from all directions, and the title song gently combines English with Hindi in ways that are familiar to most middle-class Indians. ("Badlaa nazaraa yun yun yun / Saara ka saara new new new.")

I thought about the hegemony of language again recently while watching scenes in two very different films, scenes that showed how fluency or lack of fluency in a language can alter our perceptions of people: the powerful can seem like underdogs, good guys may appear ridiculous, bad guys almost admirable. The first was Mani Rathnam's 1987 classic Nayakan, with Kamal Hassan in a powerhouse performance as Velu Nayakan, who becomes an underworld don and a godfather to the South Indian community in Mumbai. I had a strange experience watching the film - I became so immersed in the story, and took the "Tamil-ness" of the venture so much for granted, that I temporarily forgot the setting was Mumbai, and that people outside Velu's immediate, enclosed environment speak in Hindi or Marathi.

This was underlined in a scene where Velu -already a well-respected don - has to interact with dons from other parts of the city. Suddenly one sees traces of uncertainty, wariness, even vulnerability, on Velu's face as he tries to size up these potential rivals or enemies, whose speech he can't directly understand. As a viewer, we have been thinking of this character as a larger-than-life kingpin, firmly in control, but now we see him in more human terms. There is also something moving about the suggestion that Velu, despite having spent almost his whole life in Bombay, has never properly learnt the city's majority languages - it gives his situation a nuance that sets it apart from the story of the young Vito Corleone in The Godfather Part II (a film that Nayakan has clear links with), slowly picking up English as he makes his way in the world. In fact, this is why Mani Rathnam once expressed his dissatisfaction with the Hindi remake of the film, Feroz Khan's Dayavan - the remake was about a Mumbaikar in Mumbai, where he is culturally at home, and so an important subtext about alienation was missing.

The other scene is a comic one, but also provides food for thought. It occurs in Quentin Tarantino's blackly funny revisionist history lesson Inglourious Basterds, in which Nazi hunters save the day during World War II. The villain here is Hans Landa or "the Jew Hunter"- he is terrifyingly smooth, sharp... and also a polyglot, which gives him an edge over the good guys, the "Basterds" led by Aldo (Brad Pitt), all of whom are (barely) fluent in exactly one language, English, or rather, American, spoken in a distinct Midwestern drawl.

The film's funniest scene has Aldo and team disguised as Italians at a party, while Landa toys with them like a cat playing with its prey. It's a brilliant comic premise, one that combines laughs with high suspense, and invites the viewer to consider his own responses to the characters. Here are Aldo and company, trying to save the world, infiltrating the dens of the Nazi top brass, but incapable of even understanding German; we are supposed to be rooting for them, but they look like bumpkins, confirming every stereotype of the insular, ignorant American, while the malicious Landa seems like a higher species of cultured man by comparison. We cringe when Aldo says "Bonjour"; then we chuckle when Landa turns out to be a fluent Italian speaker too, and when he deferentially asks the "Italians" if his pronunciation is right. ("Si si - correcto," Aldo replies, before grunting "Arrividerci" in a ludicrously fake accent.)

Eventually, the good guys do win. But when Aldo gets the better of Landa in the film's last scene, he does it not by winning a verbal duel but by using his knife to brutally carve an incriminating swastika into his adversary's head. The caveman comes out on top because he knows how to use crude tools - speech be damned.

Jai Arjun Singh is a Delhi-based writer
jaiarjun@gmail.com